Jackson Pollock: Dripping with Controversy

By Mary Louise Schumacher

Published on: 10/25/2006

Richard Ranft, owner of Beloit Auction & Realty, holds a possible Jackson Pollock painting that is being auctioned by his business today. Other items awaiting auction fill the display areas in the background. There is no reserve or minimum bid, so it's unclear how high a bid the painting may bring.

No other artist that I can think of in the history of art gets the common, my-kid-could-whip-that-up criticism like Jackson Pollock.

He made his 'drip' method of swriling and splashing paint onto giant canvases stretched out on the floor look easy.

But it's not.

Which is why the mystery that's arisen in recent days is so interesting. You may have noticed from today's front page that what may be a small study for one of those larger works is going up for auction in Beloit this evening.

Our headline asks, should these ribbons of paint go on a gallery wall or in the garbage?

The petite Pollock, to be auctioned by a family-run outfit more accustomed to selling mementos than masterpieces, has not been authenticated. I personally haven't seen the painting, though you can view a video online thanks to WMTV in Madison.

In this 1949 photograph by Martha Holmes supplied by LIFE magazine, artist Jackson Pollock drops paint onto canvas at his studio in the Long Island hamlet of Springs, N.Y. Known for her signature pictures of famous people, Holmes died at age 83 at home in Manhattan on Sept. 19, 2006.

What I do know is that, though many imagine their 10-year-olds successfully splashing up a Pollock copy, the elaborate tangle of paint and rhythmic structure in his large-scale artworks is more difficult to mimic than almost anyone knows.

Pollock's violently flung paint sits on the canvas like a web of strings. If you could pluck up one individual line of paint, it seems the entire snarl of them, woven in and through the others, would come up with it. It's a quality that gives the artworks a sense of space and depth.

And yet, as unique as his work is, being able to say, for certain, that a painting without a clear provenance is by him is a remarkably tricky business, too.

Case in point. Meg and I both tried in earnest to get Pollock experts on the line yesterday to ask them about the telling characteristics of a Pollock, the signatures that might be present in an authentic Pollock work.

No one was talking. I got an email with red lettering from one expert saying, she just couldn't touch this and that she was sorry. The Joan Washburn Gallery in New York, which is a premiere dealer for Pollocks, said, um, well 'Everyone's at lunch.'

Ed Harris duplicating Pollock's dripping technique for the movie 'Pollock.' Harris wrote about his experience of mimicing the artist in the forward to the book 'Such Desperate Joy: Imagining Jackson Pollock' (Thunder's Mouth Press, 2000): 'The years I spent reading and thinking and feeling about Pollock . . . I had to trust that time, and trust that something had seeped into my bones . . . . The most challenging part of all of this was . . .keeping my focus on creating my own art, not recreating someone else